Essential Nature Of The Scale

The Binet scale is made up of an extended series of tests in the nature of
"stunts," or problems, success in which demands the exercise of intelligence. As
left by Binet, the scale consists of 54 tests, so graded in difficulty that the easiest
lie well within the range of normal 3-year-old children, while the hardest tax
the intelligence of the average adult. The problems are designed
primarily to test native intelligence, not school knowledge or home
training. They try to answer the question "How intelligent is this
child?" How much the child has learned is of significance only in so far
as it throws light on his ability to learn more.

Binet fully appreciated the fact that intelligence is not homogeneous,
that it has many aspects, and that no one kind of test will display it
adequately. He therefore assembled for his intelligence scale tests of
many different types, some of them designed to display differences of
memory, others differences in power to reason, ability to compare, power
of comprehension, time orientation, facility in the use of number
concepts, power to combine ideas into a meaningful whole, the maturity
of apperception, wealth of ideas, knowledge of common objects, etc.